Extreme images of violence against women. "Moral and edgy" or vile misogynist cliche?

The thing is, it's no skin off the newsagents noses where the bloody things are displayed

So why put it where children can see, and in fact me, I don't want it in my face either. Why not just put it on teh top shelf? Why is this even an issue?

spooky x-posts re the star and children eye level

great minds and all that

ROFL @ "those acts certainly look a bit shit"

Understatement of the year, I imagine!

I am carefully trying to understand your posts eleison and think I have the gist of it.

The thing is, that looking at something like the media, and something we all like to get exercised about ie FHM/star at child's eye height.

Clearly there never were laws to say that pics of scantily clad women in sexually provocative poses should only be displayed on teh top shelf. And there was never any law against publishing these types of image on teh cover of "mainstream" ie not explicitely pornographic magazines.

There was a convention that only porn mags carried this type of image on teh cover, and they were displayed on teh top shelf. Cearly that convention no longer holds, so if publishers and retailers are not held to reasonable behaviour by convention, then maybe there is a case for forcing them to do so.

It's teh same as my CSI problem. I used to really like the show, sometimes the stories are still quite interesting. But there is just so much gratuitous female flesh, and so many of the crimes are sex crimes against nubile young women, that it becomes formulaic and dull. And, to me anyone, nasty//upsetting depending on what happens to the young woman that week.

It's the formulaicness of it that perterbs me, it's all just so casual. Like it doesn't matter, that depicting a violent rape is as common or garden as showing someone having a cup of tea.

Wish you'd been around when I was being engulfed by wankers Good point about individual freedoms, not corporate freedoms.

ISNT - those acts certainly look a bit shit. Wonder whether many people complained? I think lots of us don't complain in these situations because of the reasons outlined below re. being perceived as joyless, and also because we think it won't achieve anything. What this movement really needs is a tangible success of some sort I think - something mainstream that people will happily associate themselves with.

I should have put a somewhere in my previous post.

For the record, I have never seen britain's got talent, but read about the acts in the papers somwhere. But not the mirror. Honest guv

these acts on britain's got talent. I link, as I imagine you are all far too sophisticated to have heard of this show.

Essentially, these things are beign sold as family entertainment. There were complaints and from the press. Anyone want to wager that they will exclude acts of this type in teh future, or encourage even more. All publicity is good publicity, right?

Yes I think that's right. And it was the way that it used to be before this erosion. These images have always been out there, but people had to be in the know/seek them out/tune in especially at midnight.

They weren't on straight after Dr Who or family fortunes.

However with the internet, youtube, and so on, I don't know that it is possible to turn back the clock.

Thing is (thinking now about how there was a bit of a in the papers over one or two of the acts on britains got talent) there is often a hoo-ha, the public express their distaste, occasionally a broadcaster gets a slap on the wrist. And then they carry on as before.

I don't know what the answer is.

x-post Eleison.

Actually, you know, if I ruled the world I would censor all images of sexual violence against women, and I'd police it with extreme prejudice.

Freedom of expression isn't a red herring in this context, because it's absolutely the first argument that gets flung at you when you step outside the confines of MN's Feminism section and propose the mildest possible adjustment to society-wide pornification. Propose, for instance, that lads' mags ought to be on the top shelf, and you will immediately be engulfed a bunch of hardcore libertarians opining that this is an outrageous breach of freedom of expression. (I know this from recent bitter experience.) See the pompous whittering of Guardian technology correspondent Charles Arthur on Apple's decision to make its iPad software porn-free (as far as they can); actions like this are met with a firestorm of free-speech fetishists, and they're not all impotent angry men confined to the comments sections of blogs.

So why the erosion
Who is doing the eroding
Why
Will there be a backlash

We do have censorship of television and film though. The film classification types say who can see a film, they can cut bits, they can ban a film. TV I'm sure has codes it has to adhere to. And there's the watershed (or has that gone now? Is it just the terrestrial channels that have to stick to it?).

Anyway it's that ideas of what is/isn't acceptable have changed. There are films with 18 certs 20 years ago that would now be a 15 (12?) and so on.

x-post Eleison

You're probably right Policywonk. Of course we already accept limits on freedom of expression with regard to not inciting racial hatred.

Maybe I'm going off on a tangent by talking about censorship anyway - the main issue here is the way it's become so mainstream and you can't turn on your blinking tv without it. As with the porn debates, it's the ubiquity rather than the mere existence that makes it a problem on the scale it is.